To mark five centuries since Babur’s invasion of Hindustan, @GurmaniCentre is organizing a conference co-convened by Saman Tariq Malik and Ali Usman Qasmi, bringing scholars together to revisit its political, cultural, and historiographical legacies. Concept note: Five hundred years ago, Babur’s march into Hindustan established what came to be known as the Mughal Empire. What followed from this invasion was not a civilizational rupture; the Mughal rule consolidated within an Islamicate milieu shaped by porous boundaries, cultural exchange, and multireligious encounter. Sufi silsilas, Bhakti saints, Jain merchants, European traders, Jesuits, artisans, and peasants shared roads, markets, and imaginations. Trade routes braided distant regions and craft, devotional and aesthetic practices shaped sociality and community. If the Islamicate influence gave the Mughal world its peculiar openness, a transregional Persianate and Indic cosmopolis kept its everyday life anchored in a shared moral, administrative, and literary imagination. Persianate norms of governance, ethical conduct and literary cultivation informed imperial life as the Mughal worldview drew sustenance from indigenous knowledge systems. Its courts and streets were home to multilingual poetry, translational practices and continuous dialogue between Persian, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Hindwi, and countless other linguistic registers. Likewise, Mughal interactions shaped perceptions of caste, gender, and sexuality that intersected with arenas of diplomacy, patronage, courtly, and domestic power. To emphasize this Islamicate, Persianate, and Indic influence is to recognize that the Mughal dynasty was a node in a cultural and intellectual network spanning Central Asia, Iran, South Asia, and Europe. Over time, the memory of the Mughal empire has been refracted through sharply contested approaches. Colonial narratives cast the Mughals as despotic outsiders; nationalist movements recode them as civilizational enemies; nostalgic traditions imagine them as a lost golden age. In our moment - shaped by the force of civilizational populisms and a growing Hindutva politics of rage - the Mughals have been transformed into symbolic currency. Their memory is mobilized to draw boundaries of belonging between cultural insiders and outsiders, to authorize exclusionary nationalisms, and to naturalize emerging forms of authoritarian governance. 500 years on, the Gurmani Centre of Languages and Literature at LUMS convenes this conference to reinvigorate discussion about the Mughal past - not to romanticize empire, but to illuminate what futures can be imagined when we read this past beyond civilizational myth, myopic nationalist frames, and homogenizing impulses of the present? We seek to create an interdisciplinary space for rethinking Mughal history as an entry point into plural and democratic futures. This conference invites historians, literary scholars, political theorists, anthropologists, art historians, conservationists, and artists to interrogate competing claims over the Mughal past. All paper abstracts (200 words) should be submitted to (gcll@lums.edu.pk) by February 10, 2026. @LifeAtLUMS @GurmaniSchool @samantariq30
